Associated Press

Associated Press

NEW YORK

In one of the largest initial public offerings of stock in history, Facebook said Thursday that it is raising at least $16 billion for itself and its early investors in a transaction that values the world’s definitive online social network at $104 billion.

It’s a big windfall for a company that began eight years ago with no way to make money.

Facebook priced its IPO at $38 per share Thursday, at the top of expectations. The company is selling just a portion of its shares as part of the offering. The $38 price means all of its shares will be worth about $104 billion, giving the company a market value higher than Amazon.com and other well-known companies such as Kraft, Disney and McDonald’s.

Facebook’s stock is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market sometime this morning under the ticker symbol “FB.” That’s when so-called retail investors can try to buy the stock.

Facebook’s offering is the culmination of a year’s worth of Internet IPOs that began last May with LinkedIn Corp. Since then, a steady stream of startups focused on the social side of the Web has gone public, with varying degrees of success. It all led up to Facebook, the company that’s come to define social networking by getting 900 million people around the world to share everything from photos of their pets to their deepest thoughts.

It has done so while managing to become one of the few profitable Internet companies to go public recently. It had net income of $205 million in the first three months of 2012, on revenue of $1.06 billion. In all of 2011, it earned $1 billion, up from $606 million a year earlier. That’s a far cry from 2007, when it posted a net loss of $138 million and revenue of $153 million.

“They could have gone public in 2009 at a much lower price,” said Nick Einhorn, research analyst at IPO investment advisory firm Renaissance Capital. “They waited as long as they could to go public, so it makes sense that it’s a very large offering.”

Facebook Inc. is the third-highest valued company to go public, according to data from Dealogic, a financial data provider. Only two Chinese banks, Agricultural Bank of China in 2010 and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China in 2006, have been worth more. At $16 billion, the size of the IPO is the third-largest for a U.S. company. The largest U.S. IPO was Visa, which raised $17.9 billion in 2008. No. 2 was Enel, a power company and No. 4 was General Motors, according to Renaissance Capital.

For the company that was born in a Harvard dormitory and went on to redefine online communication, the stock sale means more money to build on the features and services it offers users. It means an infusion of funds to hire the best engineers to work at its sprawling Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, or in New York City, where it opened an engineering office last year.

And it means early investors, who took a chance seeding the young social network with start-up funds six, seven and eight years ago, can reap big rewards. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who sits on Facebook’s board of directors, invested $500,000 in the company back in 2004. He’s selling nearly 17 million of his shares in the IPO, which means he’ll get some $640 million.

The offering values Facebook, whose 2011 revenue was $3.7 billion, at as much as $104 billion. The sky-high valuation has its skeptics, who worry about signs of a slowdown and Facebook’s ability to grow in the mobile space when it was created with desktop computers in mind. Rival Google Inc., whose revenue stood at $38 billion last year, has a market capitalization of $207 billion.

“There seems to be somewhat of a hype around the stock offering,” says Gartner analyst Brian Blau.

That, of course, is an understatement.

Facebook’s IPO dominated media coverage in the weeks and days leading up to the event. Zuckerberg’s hoodie made headlines as did General Motors’ decision to stop advertising on the site —and rival Ford’s affirmation that its Facebook ads have been effective.

There are a few reasons for the exuberance. First, there’s Facebook’s sheer size and high profile. The company grew from a college-only social network to an Internet phenomenon embraced by legions of people, from teenagers to grandmothers to pro-democracy activists in the Middle East.

Secondly, it’s personal.

“It’s probably one of the first times there has been an IPO where everyone sort of has a stake in the outcome,” Blau says. While most Facebook users won’t see a penny from the offering, they are all intimately familiar with the company, so it resonates as something they understand.

And then there’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who turned 28 on Monday. He has emerged as the latest in a lineage of Silicon Valley prodigies who are alternately hailed for pushing the world in new directions and reviled for overstepping their bounds. He counted the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs among his mentors and he became one of the world’s youngest billionaires — at least on paper — well before Facebook went public. A dramatized version of Facebook’s founding was the subject of a Hollywood movie that won three Academy Awards last year, propelling Zuckerberg even further into the public spotlight.